Piotr Gliński conveyed his message in an official letter issued on Monday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The document was read out at the unveiling of a plaque to commemorate Polish children who fell victim to German war crimes in Łódź.
‘We must not forget’
Gliński said: “We must not forget about Polish children who became the victims of German camps in Łódź or who went through German prisons and detention centres. Hundreds of little prisoners lost their lives there. Many others, separated from their loved ones, were sent deep into the Third Reich to be Germanised.”
Gliński added in the letter: “We must also remember that the suffering of the youngest was an integral part of all the other forms of persecution used by the occupier. Every family that was broken up or deported, every home that was confiscated, had at its centre a small, fearfully beating heart.”
The deputy prime minister, who is also Poland’s culture minister, voiced his hope that the new plaque would commemorate “the tragic past” and “the enormous suffering” of Polish children during World War II, and thus help ensure “that we’ll avoid similar experiences in the future of our nation and country."
‘We spent a year in this hellish place’
The new plaque is on the wall of the Łódź School Board building in the city’s Więckowskiego Street, the PAP news agency reported.
The memorial says: “In memory of Polish children - victims of German crimes - who were Germanised, deported, used as slave labour and imprisoned, and who died or were killed in camps and execution sites in Łódź.”
The plaque was unveiled on Monday by Jerzy Jeżewicz, one of the few living survivors of the children’s concentration camp set up by the Germans in Łódź’s Przemysłowa Street.
During the ceremony, Jeżewicz recounted how he, aged two-and-a-half years, and his brother, just a year older, “spent a year in this hellish place, without our parents, without anyone speaking Polish, deprived of our first names and given numbers instead.”
Hundreds of children killed in Nazi German camp in Łódź during WWII
The Nazi German occupation authorities in Łódź established a concentration camp for Polish children in December 1942.
Officially intended for children and youth aged two to 16, its prisoners also included infants barely a few months old, according to firsthand accounts.
Kept in primitive conditions, the children were tortured and used as slave labour, historians note.
Some 3,000 children are estimated to have gone through the camp, and several hundred are thought to have died, the PAP news agency reported.
In 2021, Gliński, Children’s Ombudsman Mikołaj Pawlak and the state-run Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) founded a new Museum of Polish Children - Victims of Totalitarianism.
The museum will have its headquarters on the site of the former Nazi German concentration camp for Polish children in Łódź, according to officials.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, gov.pl